Let’s get this party started!

Alex’s mom, Connie Williamson, says she tries to give her son healthy food but doesn’t always succeed.

“When he gets up on his own, he’ll go find what he wants,” she says. “He’ll get a hot dog bun, or get a piece of bread. He’ll get an ice pop or something.”

And that’s exactly what he did early one morning, before his family headed out to the local food pantry. Alex ate a blue ice pop for breakfast.

How about starting by not purchasing ice pops? Then teach your kid how to make a more nutritious breakfast. Eggs are less than 2$ per dozen, and I pay around 5$ for 2.5 dozen. My nine year old can make scrambled eggs. On the stove. This is a new development. Before he was allowed to use the stove he microwaved them. Even subsidized housing tends to come with a microwave.

Connie Williamson says it’s not easy on a tight budget. She spends hours driving around each month looking for deals. She has to stretch $600 in food stamps for herself, her husband, Alex and two teenage girls.

“You can get leaner cuts of meat, but then they’re more expensive,” she says. “You can get fresh fruit every couple of days and blow half of your budget on fresh fruits and vegetables in a week’s time, easy.”

I buy tubes 72/28 ground beef. The fat cooks off anyway, and it’s cheaper than its 90/10 counterpart. When I make hamburgers with it, the fat helps it stay together so I am not adding even more filler, like egg. Same with meatloaf. I buy tougher cuts like london broil and use a crock pot to slow cook them all day long until they are all but falling apart. I buy whole tenderloins and cut my own filet mignon, usually at 4$ a pound no less!I stock up on chicken breast when it’s down to 1.25$ a pound. I’ve bought chicken and meat by the case before in order to save a buck or twenty. Just repackage it and freeze it.

I am lucky that I am able to get organic, local produce every week. I spend 75$ and get around 50 pounds of food. Not a bad price and always delicious. Half your food budget should be on fresh produce, IMO.

But when Alex was thirsty after a walk, his mother gave him a plastic water bottle filled with orange soda.

Elaine Livas, who runs Project SHARE, the local food pantry, says she sees it all time.

“A gallon of milk is $3-something. A bottle of orange soda is 89 cents,” she says. “Do the math.”

Livas says low-income families might know milk is better for their kids, but when it comes to filling a hungry stomach, a cheaper high-calorie option can look pretty good.

I think milk is actually less per ounce than most soda. I could be wrong. I know for sure water is less. Your kids don’t like water? Neither do it. Buy some lemons, squeeze em up! Make some lemon-water (not sugar laden lemonade, just flavour your H2O with a spritz or two) and serve it up!

I only buy 100% not from concentrate juices for my kids. And I water them down. And I stock the fuck up when they are buy one get one.

via Eating Nutritiously A Struggle When Money Is Scarce : NPR.

There is more. More about cooking, and buying high-calorie processed foods and some other stuff. And yes, people are going to be fat and not eat well if they buy high calorie processed foods. Which are cheap. But it is still cheaper to buy fresh (or flash frozen) fruits and veggies and make your own than buying premade crap in a box.

The bottom line here is, we need to teach people how to shop and how to cook, not throw money at them and expect them to know what to do with it. What’s the old adage, give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime. Same idea. I took a 5$ london broil tonight (a tough piece of meat, and usually pretty cheap), two cans of potatoes, a bag of carrots and a box of beef broth and tossed it in a crock pot for six hours. It was delicious. It cost me, at most, 12$ and there was enough there for all eight of us, so call it $1.50 per serving. If we were a family of four there would be leftovers for lunch, dinner or to turn into stew. As it is there is broth left and I think I might make a stew with it as I have another london broil in the freezer.

Michael and I went down to Ft Laudy to see her. Dragged our old asses out at 11 and got home at like 1:30 LOL

I was going to go in this

but I felt I had too much back fat going on to rock it, which turned out to be a good thing or I would have been a melted of melted goo on the floor!

I did, however, rock these shoes

which was a mistake as my feet are fucking killing me! It was also a mistake as we cut out before her second show, which I think was OK too since I think her costume change took about 45 minutes.

My cam shot sucked, so I stopped trying.

Thankfully, Fish didn’t.

Why yes, yes she is twirling her awesome fall like a lasso!

And then she ripped that shit off and tossed it aside. A move I pulled many a time myself back in the day. As usual, I was ahead of my time.

I snagged this image from someone else – this is the costume/show we missed, she did “Loca” and I kind of wish we had stayed, but not enough to have broken feet today.

I also found out C&C Music Factory will be there in two weeks! I seriously miss going out, something I didn’t realize and I want to go. A lot. Probably won’t, but no big loss. Michael is talking about hitting up the Fetish Factory party in the future since we’ll fit in a little better (you know, as opposed to being in a sea of barely overage gay boys and sticking out as much as if I showed up naked LOL) and since it’s more “our” music. I recognized all of three of the songs played last night – over the course of almost two hours. Two were pre-96 and one was Lady Gaga :/

PS – did I say no broken feet? I slammed my little toe into something this afternoon and broke it. Why yes, yes it is swollen. Yes it does hurt. Yes I am glad it was my right foot so I can still drive my car. Did I mention it hurts?

I walked out with

• bike hooks, 4 packages of 2 on clearance at 2.24 a package. So now I must clean the garage so I can install said bike hooks and hang up said bikes. These were on my “want” list, and were marked well down.
• Jif peanut butter x 4, 18 oz for 2$ (0.11$ an ounce). There was a free Arnold bread with two, but it was only white bread which we don’t eat and it was out of stock anyway.
• YoYo Balls x2 @ 3.99 ea – Eshiva owed Dorian for one she broke and Mal wanted one
• One Disney Princss doll @ 3.99
• hooks for the bathroom, 3.49
• magnet strips for the kitchen (actually took strips, but repurposed for knives), 2.49 each. Already hung and organizing our knives and shears.
• dog treats, on sale for 1.99/box got two boxes.

Notice I did not get the hooks for the chore cards, but I did price them (3.69 for and will return for them later on. The kids paid for their own stuff (coming out of their allowance on Sunday and yes I did mark it down) but that still means I spent too much, good deal or not.

I also paid to move four domains today to a new host, and I am hoping the paycheck this week is enough to buy hosting at Sustainable so I am not renewing at my current host.

I just saw this in the July magazine and had to come speak up. I am a parent to five children ranging from 5 to 18, am heavily tattooed and married to a tattoo artist. I like to think I am a pretty responsible and trustworthy person, as is my husband.

I have five awesome, responsible, smart, funny, socially conscious children. One of the 18 y/o wants tattoos, one does not. The ten year old got his ears pierced at 8, when he could take care of them and not before (he had been asking for years before we allowed it). The two younger ones aren’t quite there yet. My youngest is a girl and absolutely will not have her ears pierced until she can take care of them (and yes, she has asked many times and can tell you now that she can’t have them until she can clean them).

Sometimes looks are indicative of everything, but often looks are indicative of nothing. Just because I have bright red hair and stretched ears and visible tattoos does not make me any better or worse than the person standing next to me and it makes me worry for our children, that we are teaching them to judge others at so early an age.

I hate seeing things like this. I thought we were over this. I thought we had so many more important things besides what people look like to worry about (um, hello, Gulf, giant oil spill anyone? Flooding? Earthquakes? Starving children in America?).

I understand that people judge. When I go on a job interview I want to put my best face forward. I wear my hair down over my ears. I wear long sleeves or a suit jacket. I don’t wear crocs and blue jeans and a wife beater; I wouldn’t do that if I weren’t tattooed either.

To judge a child’s “goodness” based on tattoos and/or piercings? How is that fair to the child? How is that fair to your child? Is your child a bad person for befriending someone with tattoos and/or piercings? I mean, let’s just go that extra step. If you are enough of a fuddy-duddy to think that it automatically makes for a bad kid, how good is your kid if they buddy up to the bad kid? Do you have that little faith in the parenting job you did that you feel your child is unable to judge for themselves because you didn’t teach them to well enough? And let’s touch on that for a minute. By the time your child would be bringing home a friend with body modifications I have to assume they are at least 15/16 years old, and likely at least 18 because that is the legal age to tattoo someone without parental consent. So by, let’s just call it 16, you have zero faith in your child’s ability to make an educated decision about who their friends are? I feel sorry you, if that’s the case. That is a huge parenting failure if you ask me. I may not like the friends the 18 year old brings home, but they aren’t knocking over convenience stores or doing drugs. I’m just old and don’t relate *laughs*

So getting back to me. Here I am. My ears are 3/4″ and I am visibly tattooed (pretty heavily at that) and my hair is three different shades of red. I’m not your typical 30-something, but I’m not so untypical either. I cloth diapered. I compost. I recycle. I breastfed. I babe-wore. I co-slept. I cook from scratch at least five nights a week. I schlep to ballet and tap and guitar and therapy and doctors and dentists and school. I’m not so different from you. My giant phoenix on my arm? Memorial to my sister who died a few years back. That bad ass bowling piece? A memorial for my mom who died a couple years after my sister. My ears? Started stretching them at 15. My  navel ring (the only piercing I have left, btw, that isn’t in my ears) I had done at 14. I begged for it. It’s still in. Yep, to you I am a fat, pushing middle-age, over-sized child who you probably think is clinging to her youth.

To me I am a beautiful goddess, transforming myself into who I am supposed to be right now.

I knew who I was fifteen years ago the same as I know who I am now, and will know who I am fifteen years from now; If you were afraid of who I was then you are probably still afraid of who I am now and who I will become. That makes me sad, because you are probably missing out on an amazing and loyal friend, all because you were afraid of something different. Do you really want your child to miss out on such an amazing person too, or make that person miss out on your child?

This is well worth the full read. One of my friends posted it to Punky Moms, and I just agree with it 100% While I haven’t brought myself to jump on the lard train, everything else I can get behind. Remember, food is grown on a plant, not made in a plant. Obviously you can’t apply that to meat and fish, well, not entirely, but you get the gist.

http://www.consumerhealth.org/articles/display.cfm?ID=19990303194521

OILING OF AMERICA What we have had in the last 80 years is the oiling of America. We have had a big decline in the use of animal fats. People don’t use lard any more. We have had a huge increase in the use of vegetable oils, either shortening, margarine or the liquid vegetable oils. Butter consumption has fallen dramatically, but the increase in heart disease and cancer is continuing to rise. It doesn’t take a statistician to realize that butter consumption is not the cause of heart disease and cancer. You may have heard of the French paradox. They have one quarter the heart disease that we have, one of the lowest coronary heart disease rates of all western countries, yet they consume a lot more dairy fat than we do, and more animal fats, but their consumption of vegetable oil and hydrogenated fats is much lower.

I will be volunteering at Swap A Rama Rama on Sunday June 27 – come see me, or come volunteer!

Swap A Rama Rama

Volunteers needed for Swap A Rama Rama!
* DID YOU KNOW…that despite many donation locations for used clothing, it is estimated that over 1 million tons of textiles are disposed of each year!

Florida’s first ever SWAP A RAMA RAMA will be hosted by Dirty Peaches Clothing and Trash to Treasure Creative Reuse Center on :

• Sat. JUNE 26 : 12 noon to 5 pm
• Sun. JUNE 27: 12 noon to 6 pm
• At Trash to Treasure Creative Reuse and Planet Thrift Store

This is the Eco-Fashion event of the year, a celebration of individual creativity and community fun. This event promotes sustainability and art through creative reuse and re-purposing of clothing and accessories; this is a time for experimentation and play…bring your kids, parents, siblings, cousins, friends…get them all involved in re-thinking reuse and using their imagination!

Check out this awesome idea! My knitting hands are down right now, but I bet yours aren’t! I might pickup a hand loom and have the kids help me throw some together. I have to see what money looks like on pay day (isn’t that always the case??)

http://crafthope.com/2010/06/project-8-gulf-coast-oil-spill/

If you can sew, knit, or crochet this project is for you. We are asking that you create sets of hand towels and/or wash rags to send. Preferably in sets of 10 or 20. These do need to be handmade since we are ‘Craft Hope.’ If you are crocheting or knitting, please send whatever you can. You don’t have to send a set unless it is something you are up for.

So here is what we are going to do… They need hand towels and wash rags to clean all of the nooks and crannies of the dolphins and sea turtles. They only need small hand towels and wash rags, no large towels please.

You know I live in South Florida, and this oil spill is headed my way. Why don’t we help clean up where it already is and try and prevent it from spreading further devastation? It’s ruing not only our world, but animals, their habitats, people, their habitats, their jobs, our food supply, it just keeps reaching farther and farther every time I read about it. It’s heart breaking. It’s destroying an area that already has had more than it’s fair share of destruction.

I’ve returned my phone before. We signed up for the Geek Squad Black Tie Protection plan when we got our phones. Hey, I know us, and it’s been well worth the money. Last August I had to take my phone back because the entire screen popped out. The phone more or less worked, but I didn’t want to risk popping it back in and breaking it. So off we go, it takes an hour or so, but I walked out, as promised, with a new phone that day.

Not so much today. No, today it took about an hour and I walked out with a used, gabbed from a Rubbermaid bin from under the counter used loaner phone.

Back up a minute. Let’s address this. I don’t share hairbrushes, headphones, bluetooth head sets or hats. With anyone. Not even my kids, who came out of my body. What on god’s green earth makes you think I am going to share a phone that cannot be cleaned with who know how many people I don’t even know? Yah, exactly.

OK. So the service plan has suddenly changed, corporate has said from on high that phones must be sent out and loaner phones must be given out. My loaner phone, which I won’t even touch, has my SIM card, but none of my contacts. So my loaner phone has no information on it except my phone number which happens to be the only thing on my SIM card. OK. Moving on. My iPhone with either be repaired or replaced sometime in the next 2 – 4 weeks. OK. I am paying AT&T 30-some dollars for an internet service I am not using. I am paying AT&T 20-some dollars for unlimited texting I am not using. I am paying AT&T 80-some dollars for a phone line *gasp!* I am not using!* All because Best Buy suddenly changed their policy to not give me a new phone like they promised when I agreed to pay them 16$ a month to do just that. Did I mention the 16$ I just paid them for this month? For a phone I now don’t have in my possession.

*I have four phones on my account – I pay a total large enough that it’s ridiculous every month, but it is for four phones. Divided evenly I pay roughly 70$ per phone per month.

Side note: We bought two DSi’s in February. We paid 50$ each (so 100$ total) for the same “Black Tie Protection.” We were told the same thing – if it breaks, bring it in, walk out with a new one. I brought that up today and was told no, you get a loaner and we send it off. Ah, no. You give me a new one. You said so.

Back to my phone. So the guy pulls my SIM card, puts it in the loaner phone, and we asked to speak to a manager. I explained that I get that it isn’t his problem, he didn’t make the rules. We go through this song and dance with the manager and again, I explain that I get that it isn’t her problem. She offers to give us the number to Best Buy Corporate. It’s an 888 number. I borrowed Michael’s phone in the car and start. That was at maybe 12:00PM. We’ve been on the phone for an hour now. We’ve been hung up on twice. We’ve gotten the runaround. Michael finally got someone (I handed him the phone after the voice recognition started arguing with me) and they phoned our Best Buy. Michael is going to get a call from the mobile manager tomorrow who will likely tell us the same thing. There is nothing they can do, the phone’s been sent out (it will go out today) and we just have to wait. With a dirty, nasty phone. Gee, thanks Best Buy!

Here is where I am. Best Buy lied to us and I don’t have a new phone, I have a nasty loaner phone I don’t want to touch. The Best Buy manager lied to use and gave us a generic 888 number that did not lead to corporate. I don’t think I’ll be shopping at Best Buy anytime soon and I will likely be canceling my service plan. What a joke.

ETA 5/1/10: I received a refurbished replacement iPhone yesterday. It took hours to restore my backup (obviously not Best Buy’s problem, but a known problem with Apple/iTunes/backups). The WiFi will not work, so I need to find out if it’s a setting issue (doubtful) or a refurbished iPhone issue (possibly). I did get on the network briefly, but it keeps reverting back to 3G even though it’s been told to use the WiFi when available (and it’s always available in my home, right next to my router). I can’t sync Things and a few other apps with their desktop counterparts without being on the WiFi network, so I have a small, hopefully fixable, problem there.

Even though this was taken care of somewhat quickly, I am still beyond disappointed and angry at Best Buy for lying to me, not notifying me of a program change, whatever you want to call it. The mobile manager never phoned us the following day as promised, and when we went in on Friday to pick up the phone the mobile manager wasn’t working that day. Amazing the mobile manager is never working when we are in there or phone to speak to him/her.

Best Buy has lost my big ticket item business, and their over priced small ticket items never had my business. Sadly I am tied into a contract with them over the insurance on the phones, but I suspect I will be dealing with Apple or AT&T directly when it comes time to upgrade next year. Not that it seems Best Buy cares about me or my business.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/broward/fl-broward-elementary-specials-030910.doc20100308,0,5494407.story

Broward schools to consider cuts to arts, music, physical education classes
Elementary programs face big changes next year

Facing huge cuts in state money, Broward’s public elementary schools next year could see major changes to their art, music, physical education and library programs.

Under a proposal the Broward School Board will discuss Tuesday, the district’s 140 elementary schools will have four options for how it handles those non-core classes.

The choices: Four schools in the same zone would share a media specialist along with an art, music and physical education teacher; electives would be incorporated into classroom teachers’ daily lessons; teachers of electives would be required to teach two classes at once, with the help of an aide; or specialty teachers would serve as consultants to their colleagues on how to incorporate electives into the curriculum.

School Board members were told last month the district could lose $80 million to $100 million in state money and have to make up for $60 million in one-time money spent in last year’s budget. Board members are supposed to see proposals for cuts in the coming weeks.

Other changes being discussed Tuesday include using a school’s size to revise staffing numbers for administrators and guidance counselors; and again eliminating extensions under the Deferred Retirement Option Program. The state retirement program allows teachers to extend their retirement date three years. Broward stopped granting them last year, affecting 233 teachers and school support staff. It prompted a lawsuit from the Broward Teachers Union that the union eventually lost.

Tuesday’s debate on elementary electives will include a proposal that schools supplement arts and music education with virtual field trips, video conferences, the Student Enrichment in the Arts partnership with the Broward Center for Performing Arts and other options.

That portion of the discussion is scheduled for 11:30 a.m. at the school district’s Fort Lauderdale headquarters, 600 SE Third Ave.

Laurie Firestone, of Coral Springs, has a son in the second grade at Maplewood Elementary School, which has already scaled back library time to once a week, art to once a week, and music and physical education to every other week.

She said teachers won’t have time to build electives into their regular lesson plans, so students likely would go without. “All they’re doing is studying for the FCAT,” she said.

Blame budget cuts and the state Legislature, said School Board Chairwoman Jennifer Gottlieb.

“They are scraping us to the bare bone. It’s been that way for the past few years,” she said. “Until the state starts to adequately fund public education, these are the conversations we unfortunately have to have.”

But other board members wonder whether there are other areas to consider cutting.

Board member Robin Bartleman suggested scaling back work calendars of new administrators, or looking at district contracts to see whether there are programs that aren’t worth renewing.

“Those music classes, those art classes … you can’t take that stuff away from kids,” Bartleman said. “Sometimes that’s the only thing that’s sparking the interest of the kid.”

Kathy Bushouse can be reached at kbushouse@SunSentinel.com or 954-356-4556.

Copyright © 2010, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/nyregion/21yitta.html WHEN Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants. Mrs. Schwartz was a member of the Satmar Hasidic sect, whose couples have nine children on average and whose ranks of descendants can multiply exponentially. But even among Satmars, the size of Mrs. Schwartz’s family is astonishing. A round-faced woman with a high-voltage smile, she may have generated one of the largest clans of any survivor of the Holocaust — a thumb in the eye of the Nazis.

At the shiva last month, another Bergen-Belsen survivor recalled her own mother dying at the camp; Mrs. Schwartz took it upon herself to prepare the body according to Jewish ritual, dig a grave and bury the woman.

“We didn’t feel even one minute that she was a widow,” Mrs. Mayer said. “She used to say, ‘When there are so many problems in life, I should put myself on the scale?’ ”

One day, we all showed up to middle school and some kids were popular, while others simply weren’t. As someone who was never lucky enough to sit at the cool kids’ lunch table, I always wondered just what it took to be popular. It was an ephemeral and intangible quality, but it was impossible not to notice that the popular kids all seemed to have the right clothes, the right hairstyles, and they certainly didn’t do dumb things like get good grades or play clarinet in the band (like yours truly). Popular kids may have been blessed with the perfect crimped bangs and the trendy Guess jeans, but it turns out that they may have lucked out in the genetic lottery, too.

via Is Popularity Genetic? | Healthy and Green Living.

I was never popular. Nurture vs. nature? Who knows. I didn’t care about the latest fashion or the newest cool thing. OTOH, I had one outgoing parent and one very introverted parent. I like to think I take after both, but the mix I got didn’t lend itself to the popular crowd traits either.All in all, it’s an interesting read.